I wanted to clarify this misunderstanding. You see, when I say I watch ‘bad’ films, I don’t mean ‘below average’ ones like The Hangover 2. You may have heard of so-bad-that-they-are-good Hollywood efforts (Snakes On A Plane, anyone?) I am going to make two recommendations of spectacularly bad movies that go way beyond that level of suckiness. Now the truly annoying whipper-snappers among you might ask “But why would I want to watch a movie knowing that it is bad?” The reason is…oh forget it. You people are a lost cause.

Normally, I would appear to act noble by refusing to write a plot summary to prevent spoilers. I don’t even have have to pretend that here, as it’s too hard to summarise the “How?”, “Why?” and “WTF!” of a shark eating a commercial jetliner. Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus occupied a special place in my list of bad movies. Until today, that is.

Behold The Room – my second recommendation – written, directed, produced, and acted by Tommy Wiseau. You just have to see it. It has:

Drug deals, involving drugs “just leave me alone!”

Positive breast cancer results

One (1) reasonably large CRT television thrown out of one (1) window

Spoons (yes, spoons)

Badly dubbed dialogue (no, the audio-video isn’t out of sync; it is as badly dubbed as it appears to be)

Characters starting all conversation with “Oh hi, [character name]!”

Rooftop chats held in front of a green-screen, instead of an actual roof

Footballs thrown at short distances

The director / actor – Tommy Wiseau – must have taken pep talks about received in childhood about ‘achieving your dreams’ too seriously. What a guy. He raises $6 million in funding “importing leather jackets from Korea” (lolwut?) and then films in both 35mm film and HD (because he couldn’t figure out what distinguished the two). Reading interviews given by Wiseau (he took the name because he thought it was French for ‘bird’) you wonder whether he is self-aware of how bad his work or genuinely deluded. (Nah, he comes across more as this naive but really ‘authentic’ guy who’s passionate about his dream. I do feel bad how some interviewers set him up to mock him underhandedly.) You can watch a ‘best scenes’ compilation that doesn’t truly do justice, or you could follow my advice and find your rock bottom benchmark for you personal movie rating scale.

Have you seen anything so spectacularly bad that you would actually recommend people to watch it? I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments section below.

a) Love the name of the first movie: Mega Shark v/s Giant Octopus. No seriously. We need more movie names like this.
b) I’ve seen a clip of this movie before. Apparently it was screened in CMU and then students got to interact with the audience, where he acted like a complete douchebag. I still can’t figure out if this is his style or his incompetency coming across.